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Harmless🍽️ Edible💊 Medicinal

🌿 Ground elder (Goutweed)

Aegopodium podagraria · Apiaceae

🌳 Temperate Europe🏔️ Mountains
🧠 To remember it“Ground elder: three times three leaflets, like a coat of arms” — the 3×3 pattern is the signature that lets you recognize it without ambiguity even before it flowers.
Ground elder (Goutweed) — Aegopodium podagraria

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

Invasive perennial plant of gardens, with leaves twice divided by three (biternate): each leaf splits into 3 groups of 3 toothed leaflets, a very recognizable layout once you've spotted it. Hollow, grooved, hairless stem. Flat white umbels typical of the Apiaceae in late spring. Characteristic carrot-parsley smell when crushed.

  1. leaf divided into 3 groups of 3 leaflets (biternate), a very recognizable pattern
  2. hollow, grooved, glaborous stem (hairless)
  3. flat white umbel, typical of the Apiaceae
  4. parsley-carrot smell when crushed
  5. dense and invasive garden colonies, spreading rhizome
Size30-100 cm
Floweringmai-juillet
Habitatshady gardens, cool undergrowth, hedges, edges, nitrogen-rich soils

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Fool's parsley and other toxic Apiaceae (general vigilance required for any non-flowering Apiaceae) (Aethusa cynapium et autres)ground elder itself is harmless, but the Apiaceae family contains the most lethal plants in Europe (hemlock, hemlock water-dropwort)

To tell them apart: the biternate leaf pattern in 3x3 leaflets is unique to ground elder; in the absence of a flowering umbel to confirm, any Apiaceae not identified with 100% certainty must never be harvested — this is the absolute rule for this botanical family

🍽️ Eating it

Partsyoung leaves
Seasonmars-mai, before flowering (older leaves and those after flowering become bitter and mildly laxative)
Tasteclose to parsley and carrot, slightly acrid as it ages

Preparation : raw and young in salads or cooked like spinach, in soup (Northern European tradition where it was a spring famine vegetable)

💊 Healing with it

vernacular name "goutweed" inherited from traditional medieval use against gout and rheumatism (external application of leaves), with little scientific backing today

Level of evidence : traditional use — ethnobotanical compilations (Fournier, PFAF)

⚠️ always confirm identification before harvesting due to the general resemblance of all young Apiaceae to one another; older leaves can be mildly laxative in large doses

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • considered an invasive weed that is almost impossible to eradicate from a garden once its spreading rhizome takes hold — you might as well eat it
Sources (3)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.